Forty Years In. The Arc Behind the Work.
From a Covina garage to forty-plus years in San Dimas — the recognitions, the recessions, and the family ethos that’s still running the firm.
A garage, a truck, and a pregnant hospital administrator.
Athena Engineering started in 1984 in a garage in Covina, California. The capital base was a $5,000 tax refund. The strategic plan was, more or less, “we’re going to do this.”
Richard Chiera was at Trane at the time — and going to engineering school at night. Jannie Chiera was a hospital administrator. She was also pregnant with their daughter. The Trane office owner had just died and the company was in transition. Most people in that situation would have ridden out the turbulence and kept the paycheck. Jannie had a different idea.
“My response was quick — “Have you lost your mind?” But I saw that look in her eye. “No. We’re going to do this. We’re going to get you a truck and we’re going to start,” she said.”
Richard Chiera, on the 1984 conversation that started the firm
The first client came from a bookstore. Jannie was running hot — she was pregnant, the store’s air conditioning barely worked, and she asked the owner why he hadn’t fixed it. He said he couldn’t find anyone good. Jannie pointed at Richard and said, “My husband can fix this. He’s good.” That was the first job. The firm has not had a quiet year since.
Three offices on Borrego Court.
The Covina garage didn’t last long. Within the first year, Athena Engineering moved to San Dimas. It has not left.
The earliest San Dimas years were spent in the San Dimas Commerce Center — three different rented offices off Borrego Court, each one a little bigger than the last as the firm grew. That stretch covered most of the firm’s first chapter: the founding-era client work, the 1986 recession that nearly killed the business, the suit-and-uniform years, the early SBA recognition. The Borrego Court offices weren’t fancy. They were honest. And they were the proving ground for the next thirty-something years.
In 1993, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Jannie and Richard Chiera the Small Business Persons of the Year — a regional recognition that, at the time, validated what they’d been doing in those three Borrego Court offices. They had been in business less than a decade. They had survived a recession that took out most of their competition. They had grown a firm from a garage to a real shop with real clients. The SBA noticed.
A purchased lot on Foothill Boulevard.
Eventually Borrego Court ran out of room. So the Chieras did something most small contractors don’t get the chance to do — they bought a lot of their own off Foothill Boulevard, still in San Dimas, and built their own buildings on it. That’s where Athena Engineering operates today.
The Foothill Boulevard location isn’t symbolic in the marketing-deck sense. But there’s something quietly meaningful about a firm that started in a garage and ended up owning the ground its shop sits on. The same family. The same town. The same operating philosophy — diversified by self-perform, anchored by people who actually live here.
2002 — Businesswoman of the Year.
In 2002, Jannie Chiera was named Businesswoman of the Year. By that point, Athena Engineering had crossed the $25 million annual revenue mark, was self-performing HVAC and controls work across Southern California, and had become a recognizable woman- and minority-owned firm in a sector that didn’t have many of either.
That recognition wasn’t a one-off. It was the formal acknowledgement of what had been building since the early Borrego Court days — that the firm’s culture, its operating discipline, and its client base were all carrying Jannie’s fingerprints. She wasn’t a figurehead owner. She ran the firm with Richard, side by side, from day one.
The 2008 chapter — and what came out of it.
The 2008 recession nearly took the firm out a second time. A general contractor Athena was doing work for went bankrupt and left Athena holding roughly $3 million in unpaid receivables. A second client filed for bankruptcy and left the state, costing the firm another $1.5 million. Total exposure — through no fault of the firm’s — was close to $5 million. Banks were closing credit lines for anyone with the word “construction” in their name.
What happened next is the part of the story Jannie still talks about.
I personally called each and every vendor and subcontractor on that project and negotiated agreements, ensuring we’d pay them. They all accepted. We still use those same people today. We’re dedicated to them, because they took the hit and stuck with us. And when we turned things around, everyone got paid in full.”
Jannie Chiera, Founder and President
That’s not a public-relations sentence. That’s a record. The vendors and subs from that era are, in large part, still on the firm’s roster. The relationships that came out of 2008 are some of the longest-running on the books — because the firm chose to absorb pain rather than walk away from people who had trusted them.
The second generation, and the diversity-business turn.
Athena Chiera — Jannie and Richard’s daughter, the namesake of the firm — joined full-time after Claremont McKenna College and an MBA earned while working. She came in on the BD side. She also brought the firm into formal certification as a woman-owned and minority-owned business, which the founders had initially resisted (Jannie didn’t want to be handed anything). Once the family understood that the certifications were a community, not a handout, the firm leaned in.
The chapter that opened in the 2010s — supplier-of-the-year recognitions from SCMSDC, WBEC-West, NMSDC, Kaiser Permanente, Disney, the Wilshire Ebell Club — was an outgrowth of that turn. None of those recognitions came from a marketing push. They came from the same operating discipline that earned the SBA recognition in 1993 and the Businesswoman of the Year in 2002 — applied to a wider client base, by a slightly bigger firm, with a second generation now sitting at the table.
A few moments from the road.
We pulled together a short slideshow of historical pictures — Borrego Court days, Foothill Boulevard build-out, the family in various decades, jobsites that date back to the early years, the cluster of award nights that built up through the 2010s. It’s a few minutes long. It’s not slick. It’s just the actual photos.
Where we are now.
Athena Engineering today is a forty-plus-year-old California design-build mechanical HVAC and Building Automation Systems firm. The licenses are current — B (General Contractor), C-4 (Boiler), C-10 (Electrical), C-20 (HVAC), C-36 (Plumbing). The certifications are current — Schneider Electric EcoXpert, Johnson Controls Facility Explorer ASI, Tridium Niagara, Argus. The minority and woman-owned certifications are current. The firm is still in San Dimas. The Chiera family is still running it.
The Honors series these Insights cover — Disney’s three supplier awards, the Kaiser Exceptional Partner award, the Diversity Professional cover, the Schneider EcoXpert and JCI ASI partnerships, the 2025 safety program awards — are the visible markers of the work. The arc that runs underneath them is the part that doesn’t show up in trophy cases.
It starts in a Covina garage, in 1984, with a pregnant hospital administrator telling her husband they were going to start a business. It runs through three offices on Borrego Court. It anchors on a purchased lot on Foothill Boulevard. It survives two recessions, one $5 million write-down, and a pandemic. It’s still being written.
